


What If: Elsa's parents taught her to control her powers with love at age 8

by barbara_princess_of_delphi



Series: Unique and Unusual Frozen Prompts/Headcanons: The Collection (non-AU) [3]
Category: Frozen (2013)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe, F/F, Gen, Sibling Incest, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-13 16:01:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2156601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/barbara_princess_of_delphi/pseuds/barbara_princess_of_delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A twist on the “Anna goes back in time to undo the original tragedy, making things worse and causing her own death” idea.</p><p>How about one where Elsa goes back in time, instead?</p><p>Elsa does a better job of changing the past than Anna does. But Fate seems to wish the star-crossed sisters ill. Can Elsa outwit the cruel universe and find their happy ending?</p><p>Maybe it was for the best that Elsa grew up fearing her powers after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What If: Elsa's parents taught her to control her powers with love at age 8

What If:

Version 1 - Elsa's One Wish

Magically granted one wish, Elsa uses her wish to make sure that her 8-year-old self and her parents are told about how to undo her powers using love. As a result, she didn’t fear hurting anyone and was not confined to her room after the incident, instead playing with her abilities all the time.

Elsa returns to the altered “present” to find Arendelle in smoking ruins.

In the original timeline, Elsa’s parents locked down the castle and sent away all but a select handful of their most trusted servants and guards. But in the altered timeline, 8-year-old Elsa and her parents were encouraged to use love as the solution, and learned how to control her powers immediately after the accident, rendering them fluffy and harmless at will. As a result, they kept the castle open and retained all of their servants. Some of those extra servants were Weselton spies who soon reported Elsa’s powers back to a younger, more hot-headed and impulsive Duke of Weselton. The Duke’s extreme ideological hatred of magic overwhelmed his reasonable judgment, causing him to immediately declare a holy crusade against Arendelle. Nine years later, the entire region is still at war.

(In the original timeline, the Duke was a decade older and mellower by the time he found out Elsa’s powers; he was still hateful enough to send two men to kill her, but he was physically away from his army back home and unable to summon them on the spot. He wanted to, but couldn’t do anything until he got home, so he had a 2 day boat ride to cool off a bit and realize that attacking 21-year-old, fully-powered Elsa would be futile. By contrast, in the alternate timeline he was in his own office when he heard about the magic, with his army officers just around the corner, and 12-year-old Elsa’s magic was still years away from full power, so she couldn’t fight a whole army.)

Having now felt the guilt of being responsible for thousands more deaths in addition to her own sister, Elsa eagerly returns to the world in which staying in her room for 13 years prevented mass destruction on a continent-wide scale, finding the memories far more bearable, knowing that there was no better way.

Back in the original timeline’s “present,” Elsa wakes up from the dream and can’t go back to sleep. She goes to check on Anna and runs into her in the middle of the corridor – they were both going to each other’s rooms at the same time.

Turns out Anna just returned from her own attempt at changing the past. Anna’s version caused her to be accidentally frozen by Elsa just as multiple fanfics have already described and she likewise accepted their current timeline as the only happy one. Naturally, Anna wasn’t as thoughtful as Elsa about being careful with her own safety, and that’s why their alternate futures differ – Anna saw an eternally frozen Arendelle caused by her death triggering Elsa’s emotional outburst, while Elsa saw a burned-out Arendelle caused by circumstances beyond her control. 

After hearing each other’s alternate futures, Anna is briefly depressed upon realizing both “bad futures” were her fault (in her version she was reckless, in Elsa’s version her pushing Elsa to use magic led to the spies discovering it). Their usual pattern is reversed for once – Elsa is the one reassuring Anna that she’s worth everything.

Profoundly impacted by their alternate-timeline experiences, the two sisters never spend another night apart… until a few months later when rumors start floating about the distinct noises coming from their rooms every night. The rumors are ignored at first but increase in strength every time either sister turns down a suitor. Finally they are exposed and flee for their lives, leaving a kingdom in anarchy with no heirs; the inevitable War of the Arendellian Succession follows, as Weselton and the Southern Isles fight so intensely that they’ve long since annihilated the very prize they were fighting over. Elsa and Anna are hiding with the trolls when they learn that their kingdom has been wiped off the map. From then on, Elsa suffers nightmares of her parents frowning upon her in disappointment, their silent condemnation of her failure far more painful than any words could be. She was supposed to protect their people, but she could not: the love that saved them from her curse also doomed them by other means.

The trolls help Anna to enter Elsa’s dreams. When the next nightmare comes, Anna appears between Elsa and their parents and vents at them. After a raging argument, they reach an understanding and Elsa wakes up feeling much better. The sisters renounce their humanity and ask to be adopted into the troll tribe, where they will be allowed to be together as they should be.

Elsa and Anna, along with their now-adopted-brother Kristoff, enjoy many happy years together. But humans are not trolls, and due to the too-small initial gene pool, genetic drift results in all of their grandchildren ending up with Elsa’s defective Westermarck-effect genes. As a result, some generations later, their descendants are becoming more and more hideously deformed and diseased – the inevitable consequence of their continued inbreeding. Lacking modern medical technology, the long-lived trolls are helpless as they watch their adopted human family members die in terrible suffering.

Far too late, watching from the stars above, Elsa realizes that she should have used her one wish less selfishly: she should have wished for herself to never be born. Anna would have been raised as the queen, learned not to be a foolish romantic, never had an inaccessible sister to pine for, and taken her place in the natural order.

(Or she could wish she didn’t have magic. But that doesn’t stop her from getting entangled with Anna as they grew up and doesn’t change their future one whit, except that they got exposed even earlier than they did.)

Elsa’s brooding thoughts are interrupted by a slap. It’s Anna, her fellow star in the sky, giving her sister an incredulous look. “Do you really think I would’ve been happy growing up as the queen and marrying whoever they told me to?” Both sisters know each other too well. Things may have turned out for the worst, but at least they were happy for most of their time on Earth.

As Pabbie and the trolls hold the funeral for Elsa’s last remaining great-great-grandchild back on Earth, two adjacent stars blink in the night sky.


End file.
